Feedback Site: Suggestions for improving signal to noise ratio

It's pretty obvious from the Lightroom section that something is badly wrong with how this forum is developing. I have these suggestions:

1. Limit the length of any one post. Maybe 1000 characters? If you (in the sense of "one") can't make your point that quickly, you've probably not thought it through and we've all got plenty of better things to be doing, even if you don't.

2. Limit the number of posts any individual can make in a day / month. Without getting personal, it's clearly unbalanced and dangerous when one individual has the freedom to suck the oxygen out of the forum by making as many posts as the next 3 or 4 next most frequent members combined.

3. Switch off the pointless emotional comments feature. It's open to abuse. Alternatively, limit it to 20 characters. If you can't sum up your "emotions" in a single word, there are probably classes you can take.

4. Implement a negative like - a point I've made before.

Does the software offer the opportunity to regulate conduct in such ways?

I appreciate everyone's concern. We're somewhat limited with what we can change in terms of this 3rd party platform - but we are discussing changes/needs with the vendor - and tweaking the things we can to improve the experience.

Ultimately, any system is open to abuse. Rather than try to impose any hard limits, I'll try and update the FAQ and Getting Starting topic on a regular basis and take in account suggestions like these as part of the guidelines.

It's nice being able to point users at that post or the FAQ when we see them painting outside the lines.

Perhaps we need something similar for the other topic types.

I'll also address the "Ask a Question" topic. One of the reasons we chose this platform is it addresses something that we've discovered from fielding feature requests for years. Often, when people request a feature, they ask for something that already exists, so in essence, they're asking us a question and we can turn that Idea into a "Question" topic type. If we get lots of these questions, we can turn them in FAQs. Also, many times feature requests are people asking for a bug/unexpected behavior to be fixed.

As I mentioned in this post "When to Create a Feature Request vs a Problem Report?" Each of the topic types is essentially a problem in different clothes. An Idea is trying to solve a workflow problem. A Problem is trying to solve an unexpected behavior/bug. A question is trying to solve a usability problem. I curate the topic types so they get reviewed internally by the appropriate people. I wouldn't spend too much time thinking or worrying about topic types too much.

I'll also address employee participation. Are the topics read by Adobe employees? Yes. Do we respond to each post? No - but we read all of them. Most ideas don't need a response if we understand what the idea is. We also want to see how topics organically grow. I didn't respond to this thread immediately to allow others in the community pipe in.

You will see participation ebb and flow - and nearly disappear at times. Why? We have deadlines. Most of the teams work in 'sprints' which is a development process term. At the beginning of a sprint, we decide what we're going to work on - so often you'll see more participation at the beginning of that period. But once work starts, people tend to focus in to solve the task at hand and meet that sprint deadline. As we get deeper into the cycle, it gets more and more intense. Please don't worry about us getting distracted. It's my job, and a handful of others, to triage the 'hot' topics and guide them to the right people.

Have we seen an increase of noise? Yes. There are some people that overly frenetic. I've addressed a few people offline with gentle suggestions or reminders - and will continue to do that.

We've also introduced the Feedback tab on our Facebook page, disabled the feature request User to User forums, and turned off the web-form on Adobe.com for feature requests/bug reports to point that traffic towards this site. We're getting more variety of users in terms of product use and experience visiting the site now.

When we set up the site initially, Jordan Davis and I had to make a call on whether we segregated each of our products as separate communities or create one community for the whole family. There was no 'right' decision. Both options had their disadvantages. Ultimately, we decided that there is a relationship, an overlap and synergy between the products. We are a family - and we consider our users as part of that family.

I appreciate everyone's continued support - especially the folks that are active helping to foster a positive experience, clarifying requests and answering questions.